"Do I need a Guru ?"

Good morning.

This morning, I sound a little different than usual in my videos. I have a slight cold, and when I have a cold, that's the only time where my voice sounds like that of a real man. But it will return to normal in a few days. But I will try to do a video anyway, and today I want to talk about Gurus. I want to talk about the question whether one needs a Guru in one's life or not. And the question arises because in my videos, I say two different things which seem to be contradictory, and I want to read out a letter I received which asks me about this contradiction:

"At the end of a video, you say that Samarpan Meditation is not bound to a Guru. On the other hand, we often hear that a Guru is needed to attain liberation. That sounds like a contradiction. Can you help me and say something about this?"

Yes, it is true: Samarpan Meditation is not bound to a Guru. You can meditate, you can do the Samarpan Meditation and you don't need a Guru. You can just start meditating, and everything else will happen by itself. The Guru I belong to, Swamiji... he's the one who brings the Samarpan Meditation from the Himalayas into society, and he says himself: "The only important thing for you is: meditate. Everything else is not important." You don't need a Guru. You don't even have to ask yourself: "Do I need a Guru or not? Do I want to Guru or not?" These questions are irrelevant.

It is like this: when you don't have a Guru in your life right now, you don't need one. And you don't have to wonder about it whether you would need one. And if you have a Guru in your life, you don't have to wonder about it either, because you have one. So, in either case, the question is not important. You know: life is a miracle. And it is like this: everything you need comes into your life by itself. Should you ever need a Guru, a Guru will come. And everything you don't need in life, you don't get, or it vanishes from your life by itself. You don't have to do it. And the same is true with the Guru. So, don't worry about it. Don't think about it. You can just meditate. You can enjoy the meditation, and you can enjoy what it brings into your life, how it changes your life and how it changes you all by itself.

And sometimes I say: "Only when you are being touched by a Guru, only when you're being touched by a human being who is already in Heaven, who is already arrived, only then can you start your true path to the inside." And it's true. But you don't have to worry about it. Should you ever come to the point where you need this touch, it will happen. And when it happens, it happens by itself, not because you worried about it, not because you made a decision, not because you answered this question: "Do I need a Guru?" It's such an interesting topic, this topic "Guru" here for us people in the west, because we have kind of an issue with this. It's like something dangerous or weird, very weird. But the only thing you need to know is: if you don't have one, you don't need one. And you don't have to want to need one either. And if anybody talks to you about it, tell them to shut up. Tell them: "I'm not interested, leave me alone. I do it my way."

In my life, it was exactly like this. 23 years ago, I came to my spiritual Master Soham, but I didn't come to him because I looked for him. I didn't come to him because I thought I should have a spiritual Master so I can progress on some spiritual path or anything like this. I never worried about these things. I didn't think about a spiritual Master or a Guru. I was happy, I was living my life. And then, one day, 23 years ago, by accident... Of course, it was not a real accident, these things happen at the right time. But they happen by itself, and to us it feels like an accident, like: "Ups, how did this happen?"

So, by some accident, I ended up in an event which Soham did, in a Satsang. I didn't know what that is. I had no clue. And I didn't go there because I thought: "Oh, a spiritual Master, this is a cool thing, I want to check this out." Something brought me there, I can't even say what, but I didn't look for anything, and I didn't believe that I need something. I didn't even miss something in my life. I didn't search for something. I didn't search for enlightenment. I didn't search for spiritual fulfillment. I didn't search for Heaven, I didn't know that this exists, and it happened anyway. I was just ready.

And then... I was sitting in this Satsang of Soham, and then Soham entered the room. And in that moment, something happened inside of me. It was like a door opened. It was like: "Oh yes, here I want to be. Here I stay." And from that day on, since then, I am with Soham. And it's like this: the moment before... would you have told me a minute earlier: "You will have a spiritual Master", I would have laughed at you. I would have said: "This is nonsense. Who needs that?" And the next moment, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to me. It's like: "Oh yes. Here I stay."

So, it just happens by itself. And the beautiful thing is: when it happens, it feels totally right. It feels like you wanted this all your life. You didn't know about it. That's the magic of life, how these things unfold all by themselves, without you having to worry about it in any way.

And it happened exactly the same way 17 years later... this is now 6 years ago... when this Indian Guru entered my life, Swamiji. I did not look for a Guru. I mean, I already had a spiritual Master. I never thought about a Guru, and I was as happy as I could be. I didn't miss anything. I didn't look for anything. And would you have told me: "You will be the disciple of an Indian Guru", I really would have laughed. Really. But then, there was this day... I met Soham. We had had a break. At that point, I was working for him already for 17 years, so we were together most of the time. And we had a week's break, and after this break, we met again for the next event, for the next Satang, and we had a conversation. And during this conversation, Soham shared with me that he was contacted by this Indian Guru, by Swamiji, during that break.

And while Soham was telling me about this, something happened inside of me. It was like the energy of this Guru came to me, inside. It was an amazing experience. I was sitting there, Soham was talking, I had to close my eyes, I was totally overwhelmed by what I felt inside, and I felt: "Oh my God, this I was waiting for all of my life. This I was waiting for since so many lives." And, you know: a moment before, I would have laughed at you, and a minute later, I knew: for this I was waiting for lives and lives and lives.

And that's how it is with the spiritual path. It happens by itself, and when it happens, it feels perfect. It feels right, it feels natural. It feels like "I wanted this all my life". So, there's never a contradiction. When you hear me speak about the Samarpan Meditation... When I say: "You don't need to Guru for this. You can just meditate. Forget about Guru", and then you watch another video and you hear me talk at length about how helpful a Guru is; that you really need it... then it sounds like a contradiction. But in life, there are no contradictions. it's not possible. It happens in a way that is not a contradiction. It's just perfect for you. You want it.

Yes, that's how it is with a Guru. So, don't ask yourself this question: "Do I need a Guru?" If this is a question for you, you don't need one. If you need a Guru, you will know because you have one. As long as you don't have one, you don't need one. So, the question never arises. It's that simple. And by the way, it is like this with everything in life. You never have to worry about anything you don't have, ever. That's my experience.

We here in the West have a really hard time with this Guru thing, and that's why the question arises in the first place. We hear about somebody like Jesus, and we admire him. We think this is really a cool guy. Our whole culture is based on Christianity, on this Jesus, and Jesus was a Guru, one of the greatest Gurus who ever walked the Earth. But in a way, we never were allowed to meet him as a Guru. The church didn't explain to us that he teaches us how to walk the path to God. For us, he's just a holy person who dropped from Heaven, readymade like he was, and he brings some sort of blessing, but we really don't understand how this whole thing is supposed to work. And it's all very weird, very... You can't really experience what the whole thing is about. And the culture we grew up in, the church we grew up with, did not tell us what Jesus really was about. He's just a Guru coming into your life, changing you.

I'm sure you heard the story from the Bible, when Jesus met his first two disciples, the two fishermen. These fishermen, they didn't look for a Guru, they didn't look for a "Messias"... Messiah I think you say in English... they didn't look for a Jesus, for a holy person. They just wanted to go to work. They were done with breakfast, they left their huts, they walked to their boats and they just wanted to go out onto the lake. And in that moment, Jesus came along, and Jesus said: "Drop your nets. Follow me!" And they followed him. And that's how it is. When they were sitting at the breakfast table, they didn't think about a Messiah, about a Guru. And when the Messiah came and told them: "Come!", it was the most natural thing in the world for them. They just dropped everything, turned around and followed him. There was no question. And that's how it is.

That's how it is with everything in life: when it happens in your life, it is always perfect, it's always natural. It feels as if this is exactly what you want. And you are just like these disciples of Jesus. You just live your life, and just say yes to everything which comes into your life. That's all. And don't worry about the things which don't come.

And we have such a hard time with this word "Guru" and with the idea of a Guru, because it has never been part of our culture. In India for instance, a Guru is something totally normal. People there are very familiar with this fact that there are certain people, mediums of God, who... because the way they are... because of their being, they make it possible for us to perceive God, and to perceive our own inside. And that's a Guru. Of course, in India there are not more people enlightened or arrived or in Heaven than here, but at least this concept of a Guru is familiar for the people. If somebody has a Guru, it's totally normal. Everybody has some sort of Guru, I guess. But here in the West, it's different. We only have this Jesus, and our culture made it so that it is a unique figure, one of a kind in the whole world, there are no other figures like him, no other Gurus. He's not a Guru, he's the Son of God, and he's very special, and nobody can be even remotely like him. And this made it that in our imagination, in our world, Gurus just don't exist. And when we hear about them, we find it very very strange. But this is just because we are not familiar with this.

And the second reason why it is so weird for us is because.... Let me start somewhere else. In life, it is totally normal that we learn from other people. That's how humans learn. Humans learn by copying other people. That's how a baby learns. The first person the baby sees is the mother, and the baby copies everything from the mother, everything: the energy, the facial expressions, the voice, the feelings, everything. And then, the little child copies the father and all the other people which are part of its world, which are part of its immediate vicinity, and that's how we people learn. That's the natural way to grow. We copy other people, and by that mix of experiences which we then have, we find our own unique way. And for us humans, it's totally normal to have teachers.

Our first teacher is the mother, and then the father, and then later we have teachers in school. If you want to learn the piano, you find a piano teacher. If you want to become a carpenter, you go to a to a human being who is a really good carpenter, and from him or from her you will learn. If you want to learn how to program computers, you will try to find the best programmer you can find, the one who really has deep understanding of the matter, and from him you will learn. That's the most natural thing in the world. And some people learn best with direct personal contact, other people love to learn from videos or from books, but at the end, we learn from other human beings. And that's the natural way, this is natural for all of us.

Only when it comes to spirituality, we have a very strange attitude. There we think... in the West... we should do it alone. There we think: a teacher in that area is dangerous. And he is. And that's the reason why we don't like this idea. The role of a Guru is to help you lose your ego, to help you lose this false identity: you think you are this body, you think you are your thoughts, your wishes, your fears, your dreams, and that's not true, but you don't know it. That's your ego, this false idea about yourself. That's what's preventing you to be happy and to be in Heaven. And a Guru comes into your life.

And when a Guru comes into your life, this is the beginning of the end of your ego. This is good news. This is the beginning of the end of hell and the beginning of Heaven. But the ego doesn't like this. The ego is all these things in you which you perceive as "I want this", "I like this", "I dislike this", "I reject this". This is ego. You think you are this, and you don't want to let go of your wishes, you think they are good and important. You think that's you.

And that's why you don't want a Guru. It's unimaginable. It's really strange. And that's why in this one area of life, in the only area which is really important, we reject the teacher. It's natural, nothing wrong, you know. It's totally natural. The ego makes sure that it is safe. The ego sabotages everything which could harm it, and that's where this attitude in you comes from, this: "Oh, no no no, this is not good. I don't need this!"

But it doesn't matter. Don't worry about it. It's the magic of life that the right things happen at the right time, no matter what you want. And if your ego resists, it doesn't matter. It happens at the right time. That's my experience. Don't worry about it.

Spirituality is also the only area in life where we think about these natural developments, and this is totally unnecessary. You don't have to worry about your spiritual development, you don't have to think about it. And you don't have to think about the question whether you should have a Guru or not either. It's like this...

I have two kids, they're nine and 13 years old. And the 13year old, she in puberty, and the only important thing in life is love and boys, and that's what her whole world is about. And she talks about it. And the 9-year-old, she just rolls her eyes and says: "Oh my God, all this nonsense about love and boys, this is so boring." It's not part of the world of the 9-year-old, and for the 9-year-old, what the 13-year-old talks about is just pure nonsense. It's stupid. She just shakes her head. It's great to experience this. And in a few years, when the 9-year-old is 12 or 13 or 14 or 15, she will be the same. She will only talk about boys, only talk about love and romance and holding hands.

And now it is like this, that this 9-year-old, she doesn't have to know anything about this upcoming change. She doesn't have to ponder on the question: "How do I start puberty? How does this work? I hope I don't do anything wrong. What do I need for this?" She doesn't have to worry about this. This drastic change in life happens by itself. And you don't have to worry... when you're a young girl, you don't have to worry about a boy coming into your life. He will come. All these things happen by themselves. Only in spirituality, we think we need to be on the right path; we need to do something. It's the same natural process. It all happens by itself, that's my experience.

And I can really testify that it works like this. I never ever worried about any of this, and it happened so beautifully in my life. I can only marvel at it. Sometimes in my videos I say: "I'm a totally unesoteric, unspiritual person", and that's true. I never worried about these things. And you don't have to worry about it either.

And when you are a person who has a Guru in your life, there's one thing you should know: you can't tell anybody who doesn't have a Guru... you can't tell these other people about it. They will not understand. They can't hear this, and they don't need to hear this. I said earlier: it happens when it's supposed to happen, all by itself, against all odds.

Today is a special day for me, because today is the birthday of my Guru Swamiji. Today is the birthday celebration in India, and I don't care at all about birthdays. I don't care about my own birthday and about the birthday of other people. I don't do much about this. But it is an opportunity for me to be grateful. When a person who is close to me in my life, when that person's birthday is coming up, I'm just grateful. It's like: "Thank you that you are in my life! I'm so happy that you have been born; that you're here." It's like I can feel the treasure which comes into my life through each and every person who is in my life.

And outwardly, I don't make a big fuzz, I don't give presents and I don't like birthday cards. I'm really terrible at these things. But inside, I'm just so grateful and so happy. And today is the birthday of Swamiji, the Guru I belong to, and I'm just so grateful, like: "Thank you that that you came into my life!" That's what I'm celebrating today, and that's why I had the urge to speak about this subject right this morning, although I have a cold and my body feels a little weak. But it felt so right to use this day to address this subject.

And maybe you noticed: during this video, I use these two words "Master", spiritual Master, and "Guru", as if they are the same. I exchange these words again and again. And these words mean something else for each and every person. There's no unique... there's no meanings to these words which are valid and true for every person on this planet. But I want to tell you how it is for me. For me there's a distinct difference between a spiritual Master and a Guru, and I want to explain this to you by telling you how I experienced my Master and how I experienced my Guru.

Soham, my spiritual Master, he taught me everything I need to know to become happy in this world, to become happy as this person in this body. Through him I learned to be in the moment. Through him I learned to live in the Now. With him I learned to know myself. With him I learned that I'm not my thoughts, I'm not all this; to just be here; to ignore my thoughts and my wishes and just to live life each and every moment how it is. And I became happy, as happy as I knew; as happy as I thought is possible. And there was a time in my life, about 6 and a half years ago, where I thought: I found everything there is in this life. I was content. I was happy.

And then, Swamiji came into my life, and with him, an entire new dimension opened up. It's like the spiritual Master is part of your world. The spiritual Master is in your world. But the Guru is not of this world. The Guru comes from the real world. The Guru comes from that which always is and always will be. He comes as if God personified comes to you. It's like eternity comes to you, to you directly. It's a totally different game. The Guru is not part of this world at all. And with a Guru comes this real world, this Heaven, God, this subtle world, that comes to you directly. And before you experience this yourself, you cannot understand this. It just sounds weird. It just sounds strange. But if you listen to this video right now, you will experience it, that is certain, or you already have experienced it, otherwise, it would not be possible for you to listen right now.

So, a Guru is like as if God comes to you. And I know, for us Christians this sounds really strange. But it is like this. And then, you stop worrying about anything in life. It is as if you... When the Guru comes into your life, that's the moment where you begin to step out of this world and to get familiar with your true nature, with that what you truly are, which has nothing to do with this world but which is inaccessible and incomprehensible for you before it happens for you in your life. And it's important that there are Masters in the world, because initially, we can only get close to somebody who is part of our world. Something else is not possible for us. We can't see it. We can't listen to it. And that's why God comes to us in the form of somebody who is part of this world. But at some point in our life we are ready, and then, we are ready for something else, then we are ready for the real thing, so to speak. Then we can see this; then we can listen to that; then we can hear it.

And that's why I make these videos, because I'm still part of this world. I'm way into the other world. I'm really living in Heaven. I'm such a lucky guy, but I'm still a normal person. I look normal, I speak normal, I have a job I love, I have a family, I'm part of your world, and yet, I'm part of the other world too. I'm resting in God's lab, so to speak, to use something which sounds really weird. But I'm normal enough that normal people can listen to me, and that's why I make my videos. In the last years, again and again, I experienced that most people cannot listen to a Guru. It's just not possible. But to me they can listen, and I'm so happy about this. And I'm like with one foot, with one leg in this world, and with the other leg and a big part of my being, I'm in Heaven, and that's why I can talk like I do.

And that's why I'm so happy that you are here; that's why I'm so happy that you listen. That's why I say "thank you" in every video because I'm so happy that I can speak to normal people, because the spiritual path, I said earlier, it's something we don't have to worry about at all. It's totally natural. It's totally normal. It's part of human life. And we live in a world at a time where this becomes possible for each and every normal human being. And I'm so happy that I can talk about it. I'm so happy that I'm so normal.

So, don't worry about anything spiritual. Don't worry about any spiritual questions, anything. It's not important. The one thing I can recommend to you is: "Do the Samarpan Meditation". This is such a simple thing, so normal, it's totally... I love this meditation so much because it's not spiritual. You don't have to imagine anything, you don't have to become the disciple of a Guru, you don't have to change your life, you don't have to change your religion. You just do this meditation. But it's magic. It opens something in you, and you don't have to know anything about it.

That's the only meditation I know... there are a lot of meditations in this world, and some of them are really beautiful... And I tried a lot of meditations in this life, but this one is unique. It's so simple and yet, it changes everything. And it's because we live in very special time. We live in a time on this planet where this becomes possible for normal people, I just said it before. And the meditation is the right tool for this blessed time. I don't want to talk too much about the meditation, I just recently did a video just about the meditation, and I will do more videos about the meditation in the future. In this video, I wanted to talk about Gurus and why you don't need one, and why you need one but you don't have to worry about it whatsoever.

And by the way: there's one thing I want to mention. You don't know how it looks like when it happens. When you hear the word "Guru", you think about a man with a white beard and really strange behavior and probably in a cave somewhere. But you don't know how it looks like when it happens in your life. There are people who got touched by a Guru, and they don't even know about it. Their life begins to start to change completely. Everything changes. They begin to enter Heaven and they don't even know what happened in their life.

You know, there are people that...it can be that you live in your apartment in a big city, and underneath you lives a Guru. You don't know anything about it, but for 10 years or 15 years, you cook in his aura, you sleep in his aura, you watch TV in his aura, and you are being totally changed and you know nothing about it. It can happen that you walk somewhere, and a person passes you and looks at you once and you changed forever. And it can happen in a way that you don't notice. In spirituality, it's like you're given a seed, and that seed starts to sprout in you, slowly slowly, whether you know it or not.

That's the beauty of this natural process called life. And maybe you know this from your own life, from school. Some people had the blessing of having a very special teacher in life, maybe a math teacher or an English teacher or something, or maybe chemistry... but that person had something which was so important for you when you were young. Something got touched in you by this particular teacher, and you knew nothing about it when you were young. But now, maybe you are 30 or 40 or 80 or 90 and you look back at your life and you see: this teacher saved my life.

And that's how it is with Gurus at times. Sometimes, they come obvious, like in my life, sometimes they come silent, quietly. Swamiji says: when somebody gets in contact with him, that person receives self-realization, but usually, it takes a long time until they realize this and notice it. And that's what I'm talking about.

There's this...there are people where we have the impression: "Yes, but for them, it really happened without anybody else." But we do not know whether this is true, because this person him or herself doesn't know. They don't know how they got touched. There's this story about this woman who, from one moment to the next, lost her sense of "I", her sense of identity, completely, in one instant. She was standing at a bus stop. I'm talking about Susan Segal, who wrote a very famous book 40 45 years ago. And when you read this, when you hear this, you think: "Yes, but for her, it happened like this, at a bus stop." And I guess there was not a Guru standing next to her.

No. In her life it was different. When you read the book completely, you learn that she had been with a Guru very intensely for a while in her life, years before that incident. She had been touched. Probably, she didn't know anything about it, but the seed enters you, and it sprouts, and at some point, the seed comes out of the earth into the light. So, it can happen in any possible way.

And again, the message is: "Don't worry about it." Whatever happens in your life in the area of spirituality always feels totally natural, effortless.

I'm so happy that you're here.

Thank you for listening.

I love you.